A variety of servers are connected with wide area networks and local area networks to compose the Internet. Nodes on the Internet are uniquely assigned with IP addresses, and worldwide communications among nodes can be performed by specifying corresponding IP addresses. For instance, people access a WWW server storing a target HTML document to browse the document.
By the way, a user would rather not want to collect information all over the world in many cases but information relevant to the community. For instance, a user wants to get information as to services provided by the local government, local shops, local volunteer activities, etc. Moreover, a user often wants to do opinion exchange and enjoy bulletin board services within the local area.
For those purposes, a user of the Internet finds out an appropriate server by means of one or more retrieval services provided through the Internet, and brows contents on the server. Moreover, if it is necessary, the user registers the server in the user's book mark, etc. However, the retrieval services and the book mark registration only provide a possible access route to information as to the community. The user still sees a vast uncultivated field of the Internet connected with nodes spread in the world. A bird's-eye view of information relevant to the community could not be provided.
The present invention accordingly aims at providing a communications technique suitable for providing information relevant to a community.